Mr. Pat Barry:

I agree with some of those points. Part of getting the early wins is the fact that industry is very good at stepping up to the mark when it is asked to do something. Once it is asked to do something, or once a signal is given that we are going to move towards regulation, it is quite quick to respond. There are early wins such as trying to move more construction towards a timber-based or bio-based approach but there are some regulatory barriers that we need to get over, particularly around the use of timber construction over 10 m, which is very difficult to do in Ireland. Some guidance on low-density timber-frame homes has been introduced that has made it a little more difficult there as well. For example, there is the issue of agrément certificates, which the SEAI requires for insulation grants. Unless you have an Irish agrément, it can be difficult to use some of the bio-based insulations we currently import. Perhaps we should be looking at developing those ourselves. There are some barriers we could quite quickly remove and that would incentivise a move towards lower embodied carbon materials. One of the big impacts of heat pumps over their life cycle is the refrigerants used in them. Some of the refrigerants have very high global warming potential. We could move towards incentivising heat pumps with a much lower global warming potential. It is possible to get refrigerants with a global warming potential of one, whereas some of the typical ones could be 600 times that. Over the lifetime of a heat pump, that will have a very large impact. That could be addressed quite quickly by the SEAI.